Opplysninger:
| A silver-spoon baby who felt the noblesse oblige and acted on it, John Hammond (1910-87) was, through his mother's family, a Vanderbilt. Fascinated in childhood by the family's black employees' music, he had by his midteens found Harlem, where he heard musicians who became international stars. Ditching Yale for jazz journalism and record production, he launched or boosted Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Charlie Christian and began lifelong agitation for racial justice, starting with schemes to integrate jazz that bore famous fruit in Goodman's small groups with Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton and the Carnegie Hall concert "From Spirituals to Swing." Long Columbia Records and NAACP tenures enabled him to remain a star maker--Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen were later finds--and a social shaker after swing's demise. Attracting readers is done for Prial by the famous names Hammond's story obliges him to drop, and he neither probes Hammond's class-based arrogance and self-absorption nor more than hints at Hammond's personal financial decline. Still, this is gratifying reading for American pop mavens.
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